Archive for the ‘Musicians’ Category

“Just bite down on that metal bit, I’ll saddle ye up in a minute, good boy!”

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SO….

first he makes a Superbowl TV commercial for cars, then he gets a medal from the Prez. A Facebook friend posted a picture from this ceremony recently which prompted me to recall a quote I attributed to Jean Cocteau but now can’t seem to find any mention of despite doing quite a bit of Internet searching. I always end up with a similiar but actually completely different quote from Ghandi.

(*Any readers who recognize my paraphrase and know the correct attribution, do get in touch.)

It goes something like this:

“There are three ways the establishment tries to suppress the revolutionary artist: first they ignore him, then they ridicule him, and when all else fails they heap him with honours.”

If it was Cocteau, then he probably didn’t use the word “establishment”, that’s a rather 60s terminology, but then again, particularly apropos in the given context.

So coincidentally, just a few days later, while doing a bit of poetry archaeology (otherwise known as randomly digging through boxes of old journals in search of surprises) I came across this “Ode to Dylan” written back in 2006. Not really a poem, more of a polemic really. It’s tempting to revise it, edit it, make it better, but I resisted and not just out of laziness, but because I thought the subject and the content matched the “rough draft spew” feel o the piece.

Had no memory of ever having written such a thing and don’t know what prompted it. I don’t think about Bob Dylan a lot really.

So the guy with perfect timing died too soon because his heart stopped. What kind of poetic injustice is this?

Tim Mooney, the most musical drummer I’ve had the good fortune to play with so far, has died in the middle of life.

I only heard of it, nearly a month late, due to being in the UK and outta the loop.

Here is a brief remembrance of him.

Tim Mooney was an incredible artist, the title “drummer” is totally inadequate in describing him. He was a musician and a songwriter and could reference absolutely any style, his knowledge of pop, rock, alternative, film soundtrack scores, and underground culture was truly encyclopedic. Yet he was never a show off. He just knew. Tim made everything he did look easy. I have never played with another drummer who could drive the beat from behind like that. How he did it I’ll never know but he could play a slow song with such urgency that you couldn’t believe it when you checked the BPM. Yet could play fast songs that had huge spaces in the beat. How do you do that?

He could play with a fag hanging out of his mouth, slouching on his stool, with a relaxation of someone in a jacuzzi, wrists loose and dangling and just rattle out the most killer rhythm like it was nothing. He invented “the pocket”, had a feel that was totally laid back, yet never sluggish. And the fills! The fills were like something you’d imagine if Charlie Parker had played drums.

Tim would be embarrassed at the mention of jazz, he never wanted to be considered a “muso” which is why he was probably so low-key about his wide-ranging musical knowledge, but yes, he could’ve been a top jazz drummer if he’d wanted to. He was that tasty good. I always referred to Tim as a musician, never a drummer (no offense to all the musician-drummers out there) because to me, he didn’t play the drums so much as he played music ON the drums. I considered him an equal co-writer on everything we recorded together.

Which brings me to….in addition to the credits given in various music press recognitions of his untimely passing (Toiling Midgets, American Music Club, John Murry) Tim Mooney was also a key playing/producing and songwriting member of another band, Lil Tiger, never mentioned for the good reason that it is a “lost work” in the library of the late 90s. In addition to the drums and percussion skills that he was widely praised for, in Lil Tiger Tim also played around with other instruments, vintage electronic stuff, weird old keyboards, samplers, and his innate creativity guaranteed that he’d always elicit something interesting from any instrument, even if he wasn’t as virtuosic on it as the drums. He was also a skilled recording engineer and easy-going to work with in the studio with a dry sense of humour. There were other intangible things about him that were charming too, like the fact that he had a distinctive slouchy way of walking and excellent taste in clothing and accessories but without ever making a big deal about it.

Lil Tiger saw some of Tim Mooney’s, all of our, best work picked up for development and then literally destroyed by music industry shake-ups set in motion by the series of mega-mergers that happened between ’99 and 2001.

I have finally put up the whole unreleased album online (at my anti-label Unowned Artist, available on Bandcamp, link through song below), a task that was begun a while ago and partially completed when I got the awful news, which then spurred me to complete it. Sadly, I can only put up roughs, because the original tapes were literally erased when us musicians were equally literally locked out of the recording studio due to non-payment by our label which had lost its development deal etcetera and so on. 2 years of all of our lives – poof! The story is there if you go through the digital album and read the notes for each song on there.

It was a truly tragic case of corporate meddling in the affairs of artists and one that seriously derailed my own music career.

But at the end of the day, I’m just really glad I had the pleasure of writing and recording with Tim Mooney. Except for the fact that he set the bar so high! I was spoiled for good and now have a hard time understanding why other drummers don’t instantly get it when I ask them to play something like “you know, a Bond theme but … ironic!”

It seems apt to close with one of the Lil Tiger songs, February and the Mayfly, the lyrics of which concern impermanence of even the things that seem most unshakeable. Tim’s playing is great as ever and on the other 14 tracks as well. Please do listen and enjoy and remember the legacy of Tim Mooney, musician, songwriter and rhythmatist.

I’ve been feeding my BBC iPlayer addiction a lot lately, and recently listened to a Radio 4 broadcast of Patti Smith reading her memoir, Just Kids, about her early days in NYC in the late 60s with an equally young Robert Mapplethorpe. As she describes the raw excitement and naiveté of her own age of discovery, the beginning of her quest to “become an artist”, she does so with a hindsight that doesn’t exactly mock yet manages to gently rib some of the earnestness of youth. Youth with its melodramatic devotions and self-conscious pretense of not posing for effect, when that is precisely what is going on. Ah youth! Yes, I remember it well…

Although my own age of discovery occurred a number of years later, in a different city, Mrs Smith’s reminiscences stirred a bittersweet nostalgia for the feeling of that time in life when there are still so many firsts to have. I remember staying up all night on speed with my friends making collages while listening to Miles Davis, the Art of Noise, the Butthole Surfers; taking LSD in Golden Gate Park; watching Survival Research Laboratories stage robot wars underneath the freeway, firing fluorescent glass tubes into the concrete underpass where they would shatter into showers of excitingly sparkly (and highly toxic) dust; running from the cops in the aftermath of political demonstrations and participating in the first forced closure-by-sit-in of the Bay Bridge after a particularly inspired one; falling moodily in love with Genet, Baudelaire, Violette LeDuc and all the great French post-war intellectuals; checking out surrealist films from the library and watching them on an old reel to reel projector in my housemate’s attic loft while we played “exquisite corpse” and mixed cocktails in vintage metal shakers we’d picked up at garage sales.

Part of the power of nostalgia is of course simply to do with the time of life. Of being at that age of carefree and enthusiastic excitement, before you see so many ugly things in other people and in yourself, before your heart has been broken for the very first, and worst, time, before you feel the hardest of the hard knocks that can knock you for a loop and even beat the stuffing out of you for a while. Though all but the suicides bounce back and back again, and survive these vicissitudes, it seems undoubtedly true, well it is for me anyway, that the bounces were bouncier before and are getting ever less so. Sometimes it’s more like a slow motion climb from up out of a deep pit of molasses, or something that smells worse, but there you are. I can’t seem to avoid the obvious cliché here and conclude that thought with: c’est la vie.

Besides the time of life, the location is another piece of the magic. Even living somewhere dreary as a teenager and in your 20s doesn’t mar the fondness of the memories of all the creative solutions one’s little crowd probably came up with to combat terminal boredom. If you’re fortunate enough to have lived in an iconic location, whether a capital city or an incredible natural landscape, then the aura is even more bedazzling in recall. There were many magical things about the Bay Area in the early to mid 1980s and I feel lucky to have been there. It still echoed the energy left from the radiant radical movements of the 60s and 70s, a sort of buzz of the idea of revolution and as an early adopter of the punk rock sound, with a rich rock and jazz history, as well as an impressive pedigree in internationally renowned literary figures, it still had an outstandingly vibrant underground scene encompassing music, all the visual and performing arts and radical politics.

But I’ve got to admit that when I look back, and when I listen to Patti, I can’t help but think to myself what a difference it makes to be at what is really THE right place at the right time, to be blessed by the zeitgeist, to have introductions to the movers of the minute, the people who are changing culture, to find mentors from the generation ahead who want to pass their baton to you and grace you with the honour of being able to reach a wider audience.

Because no matter how groovy SF in 1983-89 was on an experiential level as a place to be and live and learn and grow and be exposed to incredible diversity, no matter how enriched a person it made you on the inside, it just was not a place from which other cities were taking their cue any more. Yes, this changed again with the web innovation a few years later, but in the 80s, San Francisco was more like a super-good secret. Not only was it incredibly fun, and filled with interesting people and places – it was outrageously cheap! (I weep hot tears when I think of some of the marvelous Victorian houses and massive lofts I lived in for what is now the price of a parking space in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.) Of course that too was to change, for the worse and permanently, as a result of the Silicon Valley explosion, so it was definitely a mixed blessing.

Before all that money and madness came into it, San Francisco wasn’t a place where you could find yourself at the epicenter of anything other than an earthquake. For all the inventiveness of its underground scene, the majority of artists never emerged into the popular awareness and the city didn’t lead the way in popular culture the way it could be argued it had done for a while 10-20 years earlier. Yeah it was great but the Zeitgeist didn’t grace San Francisco when I was there, unless you’re referring to the dive motorbike bar at 199 Valencia, which I believe is still there.

A few individuals from the scene I was part of did emerge into the public eye, but I have to say that many of the ones who struck me the deepest with their originality and talent have retained a certain obscurity in their subsequent careers, even while they may have carved out a niche, or a living, or both, in one form or another. I’ll pause here to give props to the wonderful Broun Fellinis who have SURELY got to find fame someday!

Some of my friends from those San Francisco scenes, and some very deserving ones at that, also had the business acumen to develop lucrative careers, were in famous bands, or made popular films, wrote best-sellers, and I give props to them all, but I try not to name drop so, hey – you guys know who you are and well done you! I am gladdened by each and every one of their triumphs.

But nauseatingly, the only person that I knew (not a friend, but an acquaintance and “person on the scene” that I shared a number of close friends with, which I don’t understand to this day…) who has truly achieved superstar status, has the distinction of being the least talented, most unlovely of the bunch; an unpleasant and chaos-inducing person with a suspicious tendency to leave burned-out flats and dead bodies in her wake. In a scene of very creative and talented people I never witnessed her contribute anything other than attention-seeking nonsense. A long long time ago, before whatever deal with the devil she made paid off, she once squatted in a bedroom of mine while I was out of town and then helped herself to my wardrobe on the way out. I know many such true stories and far worse. These can’t just be dismissed as youthful follies, but are indications of core character defects. Serious ones. So, observing her rise and the fawning and sycophantic way the media has fallen all over her, how she has been portrayed as some kind of complex brainiac has been a stomach churning view of the star-making machinery. People, strangers, LOVE this woman, whom I shall not name, but does she really deserve their love? Her art’s not even good. It must possess some weird fascinating power I guess, but I’ve always been immune to whatever that is and it’s always struck me as intensely charmless. But then again, I’ve never been able to understand how people can stand to listen to McDonna, let alone actually admire the woman. Fame, oh fame, you’re a very strange game…

So as much as I grew misty over Patti’s descriptions of her precocious love of Rimbaud, her poetic aspirations, and her charming tales of hanging out with Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel (she does a wicked imitation of Janis speaking, ending every sentence with a croaky “ma-an”), I couldn’t help thinking that it really was a most extraordinary stroke of luck by which Robert Mapplethorpe happened to be practically the first person she met upon arrival in the big city, and whose inspired gift for image-making gave Patti the look to propel her from poet to rock star; with the second unbelievably fortunate coincidence being her chance meeting with Bobby Neuwirth, who was apparently an unparalleled nexus that introduced absolutely everybody to absolutely everybody else.

The role of well-connected mentors in the careers of some of our favorite artists has not been emphasized enough in their histories, in my opinion.

People say Chas Chandler exploited Hendrix, but he also championed him at a pivotal stage in his career. In fact, in many ways you could really say it was all down to one Linda Keith’s intervention, as she was the person who persuaded Chandler to catch Jimi’s live show at the Café Wha? in New York City. What if Linda hadn’t been so persuasive?

JESUS CHRIST! LINDA! WHEREVER YOU ARE, FUCKING THANK YOU!

I’m not suggesting that the young Patti, sitting writing in her journal, wasn’t worthy of being noticed by Neuwirth; she must’ve had “it” for him to notice in the first place. And in her case she was able to deliver on that initial curiosity by truly being a young, raw, undiscovered genius waiting to happen.

I am however, interested in contemplating that if that meeting and the previous one with Robert hadn’t happened, her path to record deals and accolades, and ultimately to legendary status, might not have either. Or the public might have taken a whole lot longer to recognize her talent.

What if Kate Moss hadn’t been spotted by Sarah Doukas that day at JFK International?

If you dig a little into the careers of people in the entertainment and arts business, those that aren’t there with a generous nepotistic leg-up I mean, you will frequently find such chance meetings as being the catalyst for getting to take a heady spin on the wheel of fortune.

What’s wrong with admitting that good luck plays a part?

One of the only “celebrities” I’ve ever heard admit to luck having played an enormous role in his career was Jerry Springer when he was on Desert Island Discs. I don’t want to get sidetracked down that road because he’s a complex and controversial character, and some people might be thinking “Yeah right he’s lucky! That he got rich off that crap TV show!” But for those that don’t know, he actually had a long and varied career before that, was involved in politics, and had some interesting walk-on roles in a few pivotal cultural moments. I was really impressed by the interview and he struck me as a deeply loving human being. But there I was promising not to veer off into a side-road trying to change people’s minds who think Jerry Springer’s a twat, and I’m already doing it. Must. Stop. Now.

But perhaps it’s not surprising that there is a strong resistance to recognizing the role of luck in some of the brightest careers. The mythology, especially in the USA, of anything being achievable through hard work and persistence, is seductive because of its can-do optimism. Certainly hard work and persistence is likely to get you further in life than mucking about doing fuck all, nonetheless it’s no guarantee of success. There are so many variable factors with connections and timing being the most wildly unpredictable and difficult to control. The right thing at the wrong time is going to fail, no matter how brilliant it is.

I remember the first wireless Internet service when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1990s. It was called Ricochet and they rolled it out in just a few locations at first with plans to get nationwide coverage eventually.

But people were only just beginning to sign up for broadband, with many people still satisfied with slow dial-up service and the cost of putting transmission towers all over the place to expand signal reach far exceeded demand. My friend Sue, a very future-looking woman in her late 60s, was one of the first people to sign up for it and was immediately enthusiastic. “This is gonna be great!” she said, “You can not only take your laptop with you everywhere, you can communicate with the world from wherever you are!”

But sadly Ricochet boomeranged straight past the dot com boom, instead dive-bombing and the whole enterprise collapsed and went into bankruptcy. By the time it was revived after having been bought in a liquidation, cellular phone technology had bounded forward and already had the infrastructure in place to dominate what was about to become a very viable business indeed. Ricochet anticipated the wireless revolution just a tad early and rather than missing the boat, went out to sea against the tide.

Sometimes it sucks to be a pioneer.

It’s interesting that the same technologies responsible for the next great wave of cultural innovation, our precious Internet and cool A/V tools, are also responsible for having fundamentally altered the ways in which people hang out and exercise their group creativity. I remember hunting for dictionaries and reference books trying to verify obscure facts, flipping through physical vinyl record collections in order to read liner notes in an argument about who produced Pipers at the Gates of Dawn (Norman Smith), having to call someone’s mother to find out how long you leave a chicken in the oven and a million other things that we now take for granted being able to find out instantly. As much as I love, love, love, the easy access to tons of information, much of it useful, there was something rather sweet and quaint about having to wait to find out something until you could either get a hold of the right book or person who could tell you.

And there’s something else I miss too.

Patti writes in her book of nights spent with charcoals and pencils, making collages and paintings and I remember doing that and I wonder if young people still do that. No doubt they are getting together doing many creative things, but I have a feeling that many of those things now involve the intermediary of machines. Now we stay up all night making “mash ups” with our digital audio editing software; maybe we build websites or write code to generate animated fractal art. But we don’t get dirty doing it and I think that makes some sort of difference that I can’t quite explain.

And although that seems like a strange way to end things when I read it back, I think I’ll leave it there.

Branford Marsalis takes One Small Step for Mankind (But Not Big Enough!)

(*Note: an earlier version of this incorrectly identified the musician as Wynton Marsalis, the brother of Branford – any apologies for offense caused.) A lovely friend of mine recently shared a link on Facebook of an interview with the famous American jazz musician Branford Marsalis in which he appears to ‘fess up about some of the really unpleasant attitudes towards women in African-American culture, as typified in a lot of rap and urban pop and which is a somewhat taboo subject within the community. Rather than explain his point of view, take 1:52 to watch the clip. The Didleybopp comment is mine, but you can skip that as what follows below is a better exposition of my thesis in response. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJiUi3dcOp0

After watching it, I posted the following and shared with all the people my friend had shared it with. All three, males of the most sensitive and enlightened variety, were correctly humbled by Branford’s comments but I asked them to go further. I could tell they were all really feminist-type men who were proud of and awed by Branford’s bravery in speaking out about violence against women in the black community, and yet I wanted to push them, hopefully not rudely, forward. This is what I wrote:

Although part of what he says is true, it is incorrect to shift all the blame onto the experience of slavery and I hope that he didn’t leave it there in the rest of the interview, thought I suspect he did or it would be in the clip. Let’s be perfectly honest. In many African cultures that are still living in their traditional ways that were never enslaved and whose practices go back thousands of years, women are routinely regarded as property and beaten, raped, genitally mutilated and all the rest of it. The problem of objectification and ownership of women goes much deeper into the male psyche and actually this clip pissed me off a bit because it failed to recognise that. Sounded like a bit of a cop out and like Branford just tryin’ to blame whitey.

It just so happens that last night I went to a film screening of a short documentary called “Dishonourable Killings” about ancient tribal practices in Southeast Turkey, where women are murdered on the slightest of pretexts of impropriety. But this type of practice has independent and ancient origins ALL over the world, including in Africa. It was once considered acceptable in Europe as well (a la “crimes of passion”) but whilst men still kill women here, it is a long time since they received reduced or no penalty, or cultural acceptance for so doing. Whilst not diminishing any of the appropriate level of outrage with which the International slave trade deserves to be regarded, it is also disingenuous to state that this was a European invention. I hope everyone knows that slavery is still in existence by the way. Man’s inhumanity to man – and especially to woman – is not the province of any one culture, race or religion.

Unfortunately it is more universal than that.

I commend Branford for raising the issue at all, because denial within the community he’s speaking of is common, but I would like to see not only him but everyone elevate the conversation to a much deeper level, (if I may use a somewhat contradictory metaphor!) It’s time to look beyond race and deeper into gender politics and cultural dissonance, dear friends, without always seeking to cast the blame outside; the war is within. But while it’s our own inner violence that we ultimately have to find peace with, I think we have to also have the courage to critique “cultural practices” that have gender imbalance at their core without being accused of “cultural imperialism” and so forth. That is the point of having a rule of law and also the reason that I would argue for International laws that supercede cultural or religious practices. Pressure from “the West” is not, in this regard, a bad thing.

Although women in, say the Hamer tribe, or women in Sudan, who have of course been indoctrinated into accepting the importance of tradition are going to largely speak out in favour of being flogged until their skin hangs off or having their clitoris carved off before puberty, unsurprisingly, females from these same communities who have been exposed to education, start to question these practices and often then will refuse to participate or try to change things. These women are then often killed or at least outcast, although some of these brave souls become activists, again at great personal risk. The so-called West is guilty of many things, but the relative gender equity that I have enjoyed since birth in the UK and then over many years in the USA, (though far from perfect) is something that billions of women all over the world could never even hope to dream of. Many millions of those women are living in Africa and I would like to see Branford’s critique become even more daring and go THERE.

Can we elevate the discussion please? Let us be sure to ask the real hard questions and never shy away from the mirror. I ask my brothers to be tougher and more searchingly fearless and ask this: at what stage of the evolution of humanity did men, of whatever colour, race, religion, or culture, wherever in the world, come to believe they had rights over woman? That is a more fundamental question than asking when did a particular race or religion find itself to be superior to another and must be answered first. It must be healed first. Because the ultimate source of all war is the family which begins with a man and a woman. Here is a link to some writing I have online about the subject of gender imbalance, if you are interested. Ladies, it’s also a great company that raises money for women’s isues worldwide through the sale of natural cause-metics (!) I wrote and researched all the advocacy issues which you can access at the bottom of the following article if further interested.